Citing sources and creating a bibliography (APA Style)

Properly citing your sources is a crucial part of academic and artistic research. It gives credit to the original authors, allows readers to verify your claims, and helps you avoid plagiarism. This guide explains how to use Microsoft Word’s built-in citation tools to add sources, insert in-text citations, and automatically generate a bibliography in APA style. For artistic research at the ArtEZ Conservatory in Arnhem we only require you to choose a citation style. For this article the APA style is used.

This guide is mainly for using Word. Explainer videos for LibreOffice Writer are at the bottom of this post.

Why cite your sources?

Citing sources in your artistic research report serves several important purposes:

• It acknowledges the intellectual contributions of others
• It allows readers to locate and verify the original sources
• It demonstrates the breadth and depth of your research
• It protects you from accusations of plagiarism
• It strengthens your arguments by showing they are supported by existing research
• It is part of how you show how you contextualized your research.

Setting up APA style in Word

Before you start adding citations, you need to ensure Word is set to use the APA citation style:

1. Go to the References tab in the Ribbon
2. In the Citations & Bibliography group, find the Style dropdown
3. Select APA (or APA 7th Edition if available)

Once set, all your citations and bibliography entries will be formatted according to APA guidelines.

Adding a new source

Word maintains a library of sources that you can reuse across your document. Here’s how to add a new source:

1. Place your cursor where you want to insert the citation
2. Go to the References tab
3. Click Insert Citation, then Add New Source
4. In the Create Source dialog box, select the Type of Source (book, journal article, website, etc.)
5. Fill in all the required fields carefully:

• For books: Author, Title, Year, City, Publisher
• For journal articles: Author, Title, Journal Name, Year, Pages, Volume
• For websites: Author, Name of Web Page, Year, URL

1. Click OK to save the source

Tip: Click “Show All Bibliography Fields” to access additional fields like edition, translator, or DOI.

Inserting in-text citations

Once you have added sources to your library, inserting citations is straightforward:

1. Position your cursor at the end of the sentence or phrase you want to cite
2. Go to References > Insert Citation
3. Select the source from your list
4. Word will automatically insert the citation in the correct APA format (Author, Year)

To edit a citation (for example, to add page numbers):

1. Click on the citation
2. Click the small arrow that appears
3. Select Edit Citation
4. Add page numbers or suppress author/year as needed

Using placeholders

If you know you need a citation but don’t have the source details yet:

1. Go to References > Insert Citation > Add New Placeholder
2. Give it a temporary name
3. Continue writing
4. Later, click on the placeholder and select Edit Source to fill in the details

Managing your Sources

Word provides a Source Manager to help you organize your references:

1. Go to References > Manage Sources
2. Here you will find two lists:

• Master List: Contains all sources you’ve ever added in Word
• Current List: Sources used in the current document

1. You can copy sources between lists, edit existing sources, or delete unused ones

This is especially useful when working on multiple documents that share common sources.

If you intend to write more documents or continue your (artistic) research, then the Master List from Word’s Source Manager is too limited. Consider using a service like Zotero (free), Mendeley (free) or EndNote (paid with free tier).

Creating a bibliography

Once you have added all your citations, generating a bibliography is simple:

1. Place your cursor where you want the bibliography to appear (usually at the end of your document)
2. Go to the References tab
3. Click Bibliography
4. Choose “References” (APA style typically uses this heading)

Word will automatically generate a formatted list of all the sources you cited in your document.

Updating your bibliography

If you add new sources or edit existing ones after creating the bibliography:

1. Click anywhere in the bibliography
2. Click Update Citations and Bibliography at the top of the list

The bibliography will refresh to include all changes.

Video tutorials

The following video tutorials demonstrate these techniques in detail:

LibreOffice Writer